


Darkness the Right Hand of Light

by JennaCupcakes



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: A Journey Across the Ice Is Something That Can Be So Personal, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternative Universe - The Left Hand of Darkness, Gender? We don't know her, Other, Partially epistolary, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:41:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27634241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaCupcakes/pseuds/JennaCupcakes
Summary: On Gethen, they say that"light is the left hand of darkness, and darkness the right hand of light".
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 52
Kudos: 45
Collections: Trans Terror Week





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, fresh off the press, just in time for Trans Terror Week: The Left Hand of Darkness AU you never knew you needed! 
> 
> Also going for my Terror Bingo 'Sci Fi AU' square.
> 
> Thank you to [itsevidentvery](https://itsevidentvery.tumblr.com), who inspired all of this with one well-timed [ask](https://veganthranduil.tumblr.com/post/626432676156588032/if-you-are-still-doing-the-i-wish-you-would-write). 
> 
> The second chapter will be ready soon, it's already mostly written and just needs some patient finishing touches. 
> 
> If you're here, I suppose you probably have some idea of what The Left Hand of Darkness is all about. If not but you want a little primer, you can skip to the end notes.

_“Light is the left hand of darkness  
_ _And darkness the right hand of light.  
_ _Two are one, life and death, lying  
_ _together like lovers in kemmer,  
_ _like hands joined together,  
_ _like the end and the way.”_

—Ursula K. Le Guin, _The Left Hand of Darkness_

* * *

“So you’re the Envoy.”

James turned from the stove and the warmth it provided at the sound of the opening door and the voice that followed. He was loath to give up the warmth. Two weeks’ stay in Erhenrang had taught him one thing: spring meant very little here, summer even less. It was barely enough to thaw the banks of snow that piled up by the side of the road—they lingered under a sun that hardly managed to warm the planet above the freezing temperature of water. No, James cherished what warmth he could find.

The man he found himself confronted with—but that was all wrong, wasn’t it? He was not a man, and neither were the other people James had met since his landing in that wide empty field, since he’d stepped out the doors, squinting into a bright sun and thinking that this, strangely was his life now. Perhaps one could say that Gethenians were men, but in the sense that the writers of constitutions, of laws and regulations had purported to mean it: a general sort of man, sexless, a creature not of body but of politics. Gethenians _were_ men, if one took man to be a neutral category.

So the _man_ he found himself confronted with. He was shorter than James, but most everybody was shorter than he here. The more notable thing about him, then, was that he wasn’t _much_ shorter than James—he certainly came closer than most others. He had the build a of Gethenian, and the same winter-pale skin that James had seen on the other inhabitants of Karhide: the pallor that came with a lack of sunlight. And he was scowling at James.

“I’m Francis Crozier,” the man said, “The king’s ambassador.”

It occurred to James that Crozier probably didn’t realise he was scowling—it seemed fixed on his face somehow, written deep into the lines of it. Habit at this point, James reckoned.

“A pleasure to meet you, Ambassador Crozier.”

There it was again, even as James shook his hand—a twitching of his lips downward, as though he’d smelt something unpleasant and was trying to disguise it.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” he said. James had never believed anything less.

* * *

James Fitzjames had landed on Winter—Gethen, as the locals called it—a little over two weeks ago, after a time-jump that had taken him seventy years out of phase with his home world. The moment he’d woken from stasis, he realised he’d not known what it meant to be a stranger before—he was _truly_ alien now, with no home to go back to and the home ahead as-of-yet unsure. He’d vowed to see it as another adventure, detailing in a note to Dundy how he planned to spend the first days of this newfound freedom. He’d left the note on the table in the mess, for Dundy to find when he woke from stasis, then boarded the light shuttle and gone down to the planet.

His arrival had been met with wonder, and nearly nothing but wonder. James had yet to hear an unkind or even suspicious word towards him, in fact, he had yet to hear so much as a question. The scientists he’d spoken to had nodded at his explanations as though they understood all about interstellar travel—which James knew, for a fact, wasn’t true—but ventured no follow-up questions, a demonstration of the curious hierarchy of reputation that governed Karhide, and that the investigators had first remarked upon. _Shifgrethor_.

It had taken him most of those two weeks to navigate his way by blunt questions from government official to government official, to finally find his way to someone with real power: no mean feat in a society where hierarchies always seemed to be shifting. Ambassador Francis Crozier was not at all like the man he’d pictured.

Most Gethenians were extremely accommodating—hospitality was not only a virtue, but _the_ virtue—but Francis Crozier had a surly air about him. Where others had been happy to offer James advice going forward, Crozier was tight-lipped, hoarding his opinion. And where James thought he might finally find a champion of his cause; he’d instead found the one thing that was in such short supply on Gethen: a wall.

* * *

The Ambassador had invited him for dinner again.

It was the third in as many weeks. James had invested in a wardrobe to suit the circles he was now moving in—the Ambassador was a part of the court, and as such, James was expected to dress for his company, though Crozier himself seemed to care little for the trappings of court. James had been in more well-decorated abodes of civil servants with lower standing.

Jopson, Crozier’s servant, greeted him at the door. Crozier stayed at the palace, in a manner of speaking—the palace was an amalgamation of houses, of which Crozier’s was one. It was red, a little hidden, but James had a feeling that Crozier was a man who valued privacy over company. Jopson was the only company he tolerated.

“Welcome, Envoy.”

James couldn’t help but catalogue Jopson’s face as he let James into the house. James had spent a lifetime unlearning the impulse—first on his own face in the mirror, then practised on strangers in the street—but the urge to categorise, to look and decide _there, a woman_ and _here, a man_ , was a strong one. Part of him still saw Jopson—clean-faced, smiling demurely, cleaning and cooking and serving food—and thought _woman_. It shamed James, and didn’t do Jopson any justice.

“Am I early?”

“On the contrary, Envoy. You arrived precisely on time.”

The hallways were long and winding. James had heard tell that the entire palace could be navigated through these passages, but that their secrets were only known to the King’s innermost circle. James didn’t put much stock in these rumours, as the King’s innermost circle was something that seemed to change with the seasons. Favour didn’t last long in Karhide, which made the Ambassador an even more welcome ally—if James could gain him, that was.

So far, he had not been very successful.

What he wanted—what he needed for this mission, really—was an audience with the king. Just one conversation to plead his case. What might seem straightforward enough to a Terran, was however a delicate negotiation of _shiftgrethor_ in Karhide. James was passed from government official to government official, none of them high enough in standing that the king’s _shiftgrethor_ was in any danger, should James turn out to be a scam.

Dinner did not put him in a more hopeful mood.

Crozier had recovered some manners since that first meeting, though he was still not a conversationalist by any standard. James’s inquiries about Gethen were met with polite but short answers. Stories about Terra seemed somewhat less perilous, though even then, Crozier refused to ask even one question. The food was good at least—plentiful, though they would eat again in two hours’ time. The next meal was never far away on Gethen, a function of the climate.

“Have you any more information of when I can be expected to speak to the King?”

With his plate cleared and his mouth carefully dabbed clean with the pearl-white napkin, James felt relaxed enough for the moment to lean back in his seat and close his eyes with some satisfaction.

Crozier’s mouth twitched—more pained than annoyed, though both were of little comfort to James.

“It’ll be a while yet, it seems.”

* * *

James was at a tavern, sipping sour beer from a warm mug in his hands, watching the crowd around him with acute awareness of his own isolation.

He’d been informed that the Ambassador would not be meeting with him this week, as he was in _kemmer_. James was still struck by how publicly it was treated. Despite all advancements of society, sexuality on Terra was still very much a private thing. But the ebb and flow of Gethenian’s sex and indeed their sexuality was woven into the fabric of their society, and not only was it treated without shame: it was normal, though utterly unfathomable to James.

Whenever he found himself baffled, James reminded himself of how Gethenians would view Terra’s idiosyncrasies—the long insistence throughout history that there was such a thing as men’s work, that rationality and masculinity were interlinked—and tried to see his own history with their eyes.

In any case, he was at the tavern because the Ambassador—well, perhaps he was in the process of getting his brains fucked out, which James begrudged him only a little bit, seeing as he hadn’t the opportunity for some months now. It was fine. He could cope without sex. Still, James found he had a much easier time picturing Crozier in a bath or on a sofa, relaxing, than finding a partner to be with. He seemed an artist of solitude.

“Envoy!”

A number of patrons had recognised him. It was hard not to see, James reasoned, for his body to Gethenians was that of a person undoubtedly in _kemmer_. James had never considered his body particularly masculine, but compared to Gethenians, he could not help but see every way in which he was lacking in androgyny: he was too tall, his jaw too square, his hands too big. No matter, he told himself. It was a body, and it served him well.

James turned towards the direction from which the call had come. The person was leaning over the back of a chair, an attentive spark in his eyes. “We were wondering if you’ve visited Orgoreyn yet.”

James shook his head. “I’ve not had the occasion.”

The man snuffed. “Well, you shouldn’t. It’s not worth it.”

Snickering from the table behind him—undoubtedly his friends. James frowned, but the man continued. “You should visit the other domains of Karhide. There’s enough to discover in this country.”

The man’s lips twitched. He was trying to keep a smile at bay, and James had a feeling it wasn’t the comradely sort.

“Thank you for the advice.”

Someone at the table snorted loudly, then got up and walked a few paces. James could see his shoulders shaking from suppressed laughter.

He got up abruptly. “It was a pleasure talking to you,” he said curtly, then turned on his heel and walked out.

The cold air was a shock, but then again it always was. James took a few breaths to calm himself—it did little but remind him of the alien smells, the alien atmosphere that surrounded him.

The door of the tavern opened. James whirled around, half-fearing that it was one of the young men from earlier, but the person that stepped out of the tavern was older—forty, perhaps fifty, with chin-length curls and a sharp nose.

“They were making fun of you, you know.”

“I gathered as much,” James said. He knew he should try to be less petty, but the long months leading nowhere had frustrated him more than he cared to admit.

“Would you walk a few paces with me?” When James didn’t respond immediately, the man held out a hand. “Thomas. I know Ambassador Crozier. We’re old… friends.”

James shook his hand. There was something behind that last word, a proprietary note, spoken casually. The sort of tone that let James know there was history, and at the same time disinvited him from inquiring. They started walking.

“It’s _shifgrethor_ , right?” Thomas said when they were a few streets from the tavern. “Crozier tells me you don’t have a concept like it, which shouldn’t surprise me, I suppose. But they were insulting yours, you see.”

“I don’t have any _shifgrethor_ ,” James said.

“Precisely.” Thomas emphasised his point with an energetic gesture of his hand. “That’s what they were saying.”

“As a concept, it has no meaning to me, so I take no insult.”

It was an understandable impulse—after all, James still found himself trying to categorise Gethenians into men and women, categories that were more arbitrary here than they were on Terra. They were powerful ordering principles.

Thomas gave him an appraising look. “You’re really from space?”

“I’m from a planet, just like you.”

Thomas let out a laugh, loud and guffawing. “Maybe Crozier is right about you.”

James would have given a lot to know what precisely the Ambassador had told Thomas about him, but he didn’t want to violate any more social conventions today—he would have to get better at playing _shifgrethor_ , if he wanted this mission to succeed.

Thomas left James at the entrance to his dwelling. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Envoy.”

* * *

On the eve of his six-month anniversary of his landing on Gethen, James received another invitation from Ambassador Crozier.

James was free to wander the city in his spare time—and spare time he had plenty—and had come to the conclusion that it was no failing of his own that led to this strained relationship with Ambassador Crozier. Other Gethenians were helpful, happy to offer advice when James struggled with the customs of Karhide. They laughed at his stories, asked questions about Terra—though there was always an undercurrent of doubt when he spoke with people on the street.

With Crozier, it was the opposite.

Crozier did not doubt James’s origins, or at least nothing in his actions led James to believe that he did. But he was miserly with his advice, and his smiles were more strained than polite. James couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

Dinner, thus, was a solitary affair, even in Crozier’s presence. James thought darkly that Crozier must make a poor ambassador, and wondered how he had retained the post in this land of shifting hierarchies.

“I hear there’s trouble at the border.”

Crozier frowned into his beer at the sound of James’s voice. James had learnt not to be too insulted at the expression, though it still ate at him as the temperature dropped and he found himself confined to his dwelling more often.

“It’s— _ah_ —it’s nothing.” Crozier cleared his throat, and gave James what he no doubt thought to be a reassuring smile. “Borders have always been more of an abstraction for us, you understand. Sometimes, the precise allegiance of a village becomes a matter of brute force rather than political power.”

“Sounds like trouble to me,” said James, who knew Terran history well. It always seemed innocuous at first.

“We don’t have your experience with… _war_.”

Crozier had a way of pronouncing it that laid all his distaste for the concept into the word. It was true, Gethen had no concept of large-scale armed conflict—for one, such a thing required a capacity for mass mobilisation that the people of this planet seemed simply incapable of. A lack of a masculine desire to prove oneself, perhaps. James was beginning to put less and less stock in such essentialisms.

“Neither did Terra, I suppose, until we did.”

That wrested a rare, wry smile from Crozier. “A first for everything, hm?”

There was something rogue-ish about how he said it, that left James stunned as Crozier cut another slice of roast and methodically deposited it on his plate. That had sounded almost like—

“I’m surprised you’ve heard of it at all,” Crozier said, “Sassinoth is very far away for most people in Erhenrang.”

“I’m here to learn, as you know.”

Crozier’s eyes flickered up at James at that. His gaze, from under those lashes, was calmly assessing James. It startled James.

“How were you selected for this mission, Envoy Fitzjames?” asked Crozier.

“I volunteered.”

James had thought about the curious position of the volunteer often since he woke up from stasis. James had always been slave to his insatiable impulse to be first and best among his peers. He’d seized every opportunity for advancement, always a firm believer in the Ekumen’s mission. There was something terribly romantic about it that had spoken to him since his earliest days—but the true reason he joined up was that he simply could not bear the thought that someone else might have done it. Was that volunteering? Sometimes James wondered what it was like to be someone who did not run headfirst into danger.

Crozier narrowed his eyes at James.

“You understand the service of your country, then, but not the call of duty.”

“I understand duty well enough.”

James felt like he’d been caught wrong-footed. He’d never been probed so thoroughly, nor with any idea of where the conversation was leading, in all his time on Gethen. Crozier shook his head and went back to his food.

James set, fork frozen in his hand, watching Crozier a while longer, but he ventured nothing further. He had the air of a statesman that abruptly changed into the caged behaviour of a spurned lover, James thought. Like he was afraid someone would steal the secrets he hoarded.

“Any news on when I can expect to meet the king?”

Crozier smiled—an enigmatic smile, or simply a smile that acknowledged James already knew the answer. “Soon, I’m sure.”

* * *

James had been ten months in Erhenrang when he first found cause to leave the city again, on the day he learnt his objectives with regard to the king and his mission had moved a lot closer within reach.

“How good of a walker are you, Envoy?” the Ambassador had asked him at the end of their last dinner. James, not sure whether modesty or an honest assessment of his skills was needed in answer, had opted for honesty.

“I’m a veteran of cross-country treks, actually.”

Crozier’s eyes had twinkled with something like mirth, and James wondered whether his statement had read as a boast to Crozier. “Then will you do me the honour of accompanying me on a walk next week?”

James had accepted, and then spent the following week puzzling over the invitation. Was it a formal event? What should he wear? Where would they be going? He had never missed Dundy as much as over the course of those days.

He met the Ambassador at his house, and they set out wordlessly, falling easily into step with each other. After a few turns down winding streets that James still couldn’t quite puzzle out, they exited the palace grounds. Here, in the more populated parts of the city, Crozier began commenting on their surroundings, explaining to James what he was seeing.

James knew much of this from the investigators—those first representatives of the Ekumen who had come to Gethen in disguise, to learn about the planet and prepare the ground for the Envoy—but he nodded along and asked questions where things had changed over the last sixty years. Crozier answered them with patience.

It was one of those rare days where one could occasionally catch a glimpse of the sun between the clouds. James turned his face to it whenever it came out. They reached the city limits, and turned on the road beyond it—foot traffic was common in Karhide, and indeed everywhere on Gethen. Powered vehicles weren’t common. People mostly got where they wanted to get by walking.

“Envoy, I’ve been wondering,” Crozier said eventually—when they had cleared the busy roads, James surmised. “What does the Ekumen see in Gethen? Why convince us to join?”

“It serves the advancement of all mankind,” James said promptly. This he knew well—the mission, the creed indeed, of the Ekumen. He’d grown up with it, he breathed it.

“I see how _we_ might profit,” Crozier said, “We could learn to fly in your ships. You talk of—what do you call it?—mindspeak. You come from a world of wonders, it seems.” The way he said it hinted at some irony that James was happy to ignore. “What I don’t understand is what _you_ would get from _us_.”

“Perhaps it helps to think of the relationship in a less transactional manner,” James said, “And after all, meetings between new cultures are always productive, when they occur in the spirit of exchange and mutual understanding.”

“You are a very idealistic man, Envoy,” Crozier said.

“A mission like this requires an idealist, Ambassador.”

Crozier shook his head. “Perhaps it’s an effect of this mindspeak. I imagine it’s a beautiful and terrifying world where people can’t lie to each other.”

The interest of most Gethenians in James’s tales of mindspeak—telepathy—had waned when he’d told them that he would not teach them, not yet. In the absence of proof, it remained a tall tale. But Crozier had fixated on it, had mentioned it once or twice already. James had taken note of it.

“Every relationship starts with trust,” James said, “Or else we’re committed to misunderstanding each other.”

“Wise words.” The Ambassador was in an uncharacteristically good mood. “You’ll be happy to hear that your audience has been granted.”

James stopped. For a moment, the path around him seemed to be narrowing, like a dark tunnel was encroaching on his vision. He took a breath, and felt it clear.

“That’s wonderful news.”

Dundy. He would get to see Dundy again. Men, women, other people who understood him, and who did not have to struggle to see him as human.

“It’s two months’ time from now, so we’ll have ample time to prepare you.” Crozier waited until James caught up with him to start walking again.

Prepare him? James hadn’t even considered Crozier an ally in his cause, had secretly doubted that the request for an audience had been put in, and now he would help James prepare? Then again, perhaps it was only to avoid losing face.

“Thank you,” James said.

Crozier looked on ahead, down the long road, towards where it disappeared on the horizon. Perhaps he was seeing something akin to what James was seeing: a brighter future, a lighter load on his shoulders. They walked on.

* * *

The night of his last dinner with Ambassador Crozier, James was late to the Corner Red Dwelling.

Jopson was already waiting by the door, an uncharacteristically worried expression on his face. It hardened the soft lines of it, and suddenly he looked not at all matronly to James. He looked like a page, ready to defend his knight.

“I apologise,” James said, “There was a couple at my—the landlady—”

Jopson waved it away. “Please, Envoy. Ambassador Crozier is waiting for you.”

He took James down the familiar, winding hallways. They found Crozier by the fire, nursing a warm beer, the flickering light drawing shadows on his face that deepened the worry lines.

“Dinner will be served shortly,” Jopson said, then disappeared. It occurred to James that Jopson might actually know the secret passageways of the palace, with how suddenly he tended to appear and disappear.

“I’m glad to see you’re alright, Envoy.”

The Ambassador’s words stunned James, who, in his whole year on Gethen, had never heard so much as a kind greeting from the man’s mouth.

“Of course I’m equally glad to see that you’re well,” he responded. That prompted a wry laugh from Crozier.

“Is something the matter?”

Crozier waved his hand in a dismissive manner and returned to his beer. He settled in front of the fire, very much the picture of an aging man turning his bones towards the warmth, though there was always that undercurrent of something fey about him, the parts that eluded categorisation, that confused James’s senses.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been very attentive towards you. Or not as attentive as your situation required me to be.”

James—who supposed this could only be about the audience and its lateness—took a minute to settle before the fire. “Well, whatever it is,” he said at length, “it’s done now, and we’re moving forward.”

Crozier drew himself up suddenly at that. “Indeed.”

He took a long drink from his beer, throat working as he swallowed. There was a noble sort of defeat in the gesture, something of a man steeling himself for an inevitable fate. James decided to wait and see.

“What prompted you to choose Karhide for your mission, Envoy?”

Crozier’s eyes were on him again—those pale blue eyes, the colour of glaciers and just as sharp. James had been scrutinised down to his constituent parts by that gaze, and still the Ambassador turned it on him like there was something about James he had yet to decipher.

“Luck of the draw, I suppose.”

“A man might wish to see the entirety of the map he is working with, hm?” Crozier leaned forward, one eyebrow cocked.

“I thought it best to study one country more closely,” James said slowly.

“Of course,” the Ambassador said. “And after all, as we say, a man who wishes to visit Orgoreyn tomorrow had best put in for it today.”

He gave a nod that seemed to him more meaningful than to James.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” James said.

Dinner, then, was a strange affair. Crozier looked like he kept waiting for James to say something. When it was over, and the plates cleared, Crozier stood. “So it’s decided then. You’ll not see the king tomorrow?”

James reeled. “What?”

Crozier uttered an oath, then—the only time James had heard him do so. “Don’t make this difficult, please!”

“I’m not trying!” James said. His frustration with the man was mounting. If only he’d say one sensible word, instead of endlessly dancing around a topic. “It’s you who keeps everything shrouded in mystery.”

“Envoy, please.” Crozier looked genuinely hurt by James’s words. “I’ll need you to listen, for once, not just speak. What little favour I’ve had with the king is lost. I wagered my _shifgrethor_ on a childish conflict in the Sinoth valley, trying to make use of what little power this position afforded me. I should have known I would not be able to fight on two fronts.”

“How does this concern me?”

It was a setback, surely, but if James kept his appointment, he didn’t see why he shouldn’t still be able to convince the king of the value of joining the Ekumen.

“My support of your mission is well-known.”

That was news to James.

“Is it?”

“I fear I may have become a liability for you, by advocating your position so publicly.”

“I am glad to hear you did,” James said, because he was, and doubted still that Crozier had ever done such a thing. If he had, it had not been within hearing of James.

There was a look of consternation on Crozier’s face when next he looked up. “Envoy Fitzjames,” he said, “I’m afraid I’m not making myself very clear.”

“No,” James said coolly, no longer caring if he didn’t sound diplomatic, “No, you are not.”

Crozier was on the verge of something else, James could tell—he wrestled with the words, mouth agape, and James held his breath. Then Crozier shook his head, casting his gaze downwards at his hands. “I’ve been a poor Ambassador in all regards.”

When James did not respond, Crozier looked up. He pursed his lips, nodded. James told himself it was entirely Crozier’s fault, that he should not feel bad for seeing him so downcast.

“I’m sorry that I haven’t served you as well as I should have, Envoy,” the Ambassador said, “I hope you’ll find yourself vindicated shortly. _Jopson_.”

James heard steps coming down the hallway and knew he only had another minute or so before Jopson would—politely but firmly—escort him out the door. “Ambassador Crozier—”

“Good luck tomorrow, hm?” Crozier’s smile was a mockery of the thing. In the coming weeks, James would find it impossible to picture him any other way—a man facing a battle down with a snarl masking as a grin, knowing he would lose.

* * *

The news came through the radio the next morning, in the monotonous drone of an announcer that did not know he was turning James’s world upside down. James paused in his dressing—a task that had once taken him half an hour, and now took a little under twenty minutes—and went over to turn up the sound.

Ambassador Crozier, for crimes of treason, had been exiled from Karhide. He was given three days to leave the country. After that, it would be the death penalty for him.

James sat down on his bed, mouth agape, one foot socked, the other sock hanging limply in his left hand. The announcer was still droning on in the background, now about the weather or some other triviality. A log in the fire cracked, but James didn’t even flinch. He stared at his largely vacant room, his so-called home on a foreign planet, and felt—

For the first time since his arrival, he felt well and truly alone.


	2. Chapter 2

> _The following entries are taken from the mission log of First Mobile James Fitzjames of the Ekumen. All Mobiles are required to keep such logs, which are returned to the Ekumen upon completion of their mission, or the Mobile’s death._
> 
> _Note: Though paper records are not entirely uncommon, most Mobile journals are recorded in their ainsible. James Fitzjames remarks in the margins of this journal the regrettable loss of his ainsible due to an arrest in Orgoreyn. It took some weeks for him to acquire pen and paper to continue his logkeeping. The ainsible remains lost, though its retrieval has become a condition for Orgoreyn’s accession to the Ekumen._
> 
> _The First Mobile has also incorporated the journal entries of a man he identifies as Ambassador Francis R.M. Crozier. These entries appear to be genuine diary entries and are dated more precisely than the Mobile’s entries._

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-2-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93. _

I was bored out of my mind by the time Ambassador Crozier let me anywhere near pen and paper.

By all accounts, I should have been thanking him on my knees. Had I spent another week, even another day in that camp, there would not have been much of me left to return to the Ekumen. Though such things are the fate of a Mobile in the line of duty, it would have been a most unseemly end to my mission and myself, even if the Ambassador pronounced it _“no less than I would have deserved.”_

He was sitting by my side when I woke, but he wasn’t looking at me: he was staring at the closed tent flap. He looked pale, like he’d had a couple bad days’ sleep, worse even than he’d looked when I found him in his exile in Orgoreyn. I will admit now that his face was the last face I thought I’d see—not that I was thinking of seeing anything again. I had made my peace with dying in that camp.

He reacted quickly when I stirred and asked me a number of questions to ascertain my mental fitness, which I found insulting and told him so. I will never forget the face he made—pained and disbelieving in equal measure.

“Be glad,” he said, “that you are still here to be insulted by the likes of me. They would have killed you, spy or not, to save themselves.”

“I went to Orgoreyn on your advice,” I reminded him. It had been a strange few months. With the climate he’d left me in Karhide, trying my luck in Orgoreyn had seemed the only option. And things had looked up, for a while—until the ruling party decided I was a Karhidish spy to save face and disappeared me in a prison camp, at least.

At my words, the ambassador retreated to his side of our little tent—there wasn’t much in the way of privacy, a small stove and a sleeping bag into which I was snugly rolled, although it was plainly made for someone shorter than me. I took a moment to compose myself and found myself bombarded with a range of questions. How had he freed me? More importantly, why? I longed for my ainsible, or at least a calendar that would have allowed me to ascertain how much time I’d passed in the facility.

Perhaps this all would have been easier if it had been anyone except Ambassador Crozier. He’d seemed more miserable in his exile in Orgoreyn than I’d ever seen him before. To my shame, I had avoided him. I did not want to be tainted with the suspicion that befell him, traitor to Karhide and a curiosity in Orgoreyn. Little good it had done me, in the end.

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Odyrny Thern of the Year 1_

_“Whenever I look at him, I am overcome with disgust.”_

I’ve made the error of going back through some past entries in my journal. Boredom is half the danger of any winter, as many a man on Gethen will attest. Looking at my own words now, I am ashamed, and wonder if the envoy looked at me with the same prejudice that I held when I looked at him. They sure seem to have bred it out of them wherever he comes from, but if he’s just as human as we are, like he claims he is, he must have felt it.

_“I cannot help it, and whatever archivist chooses to rifle through my diary in the future may judge me for it. Envoy Fitzjames is a perversion, and everybody is secretly thinking it.”_

I was a different man, then. That’s a comforting illusion. I was the same man, but I knew less while thinking I knew more. My first emotion towards him, I remember, was pity. Stumbling out of that contraption he calls a ship, I looked and saw a person in _kemmer_ , surely half dead with unfulfilled needs. But his condition didn’t distress him. It disgusted me, how he revelled in it.

I have made an effort to be kinder towards him.

He and I have both had to recover over the last days—he from his imprisonment in the labour camp, and I from the effort it took to free him—and while we have nothing to do but sit in our tent and will our bodies back to health, I answer his questions. The man does have many questions.

What unnerves me is how readily he accepted he’d die in that camp. I’ve seen duty before, thought myself a dutiful servant of the king all my life, but I’ve never seen dedication like his before. “They would have sent another after me,” he says, as though that would be of any use to him! As though he himself is nothing more than his position—First Mobile—as easily replaced as a rotted wood beam.

We’ve also taken the last days to take stock of our situation, as it were.

The envoy can’t go back to Orgoreyn. That much is clear to both him and me. But his mission must be accomplished one way or another, and the only other option we have besides Orgoreyn is Karhide—from which we are separated by roughly eight hundred miles of ice sheet. In my case, there’s also the problem of banishment, but in order to worry about that, I tell myself I must first get there.

The envoy made a half-hearted suggestion, something about appealing to the better nature of man in Orgoreyn, but I’m happy to say he gave that up after a minute or two. He’s seen the kind of small-minded bureaucrats Orgoreyn produces—not even politicians, no, those would have vision. Orgoreyn has replaced its vision with a chain of command. My pointed look and his still weakened state probably helped my argument and undermined his.

I laid out my plan in the plainest terms I could find—I don’t want to couch it for him; the way across the ice will be hard. He has to understand that. It’s eight hundred miles through uncharted territory, in the middle of winter. A sane person would give up now. A man with a mission—a man with a purpose so holy that he subjects himself to it, body and soul, might consider it.

The envoy agreed; that unthinking determination back on his face. We decided on it that night, and I spent the next day figuring out the logistics. He left me to that.

It will be tight. What we have in provisions will have to be supplemented, and that can’t be done by legal means at this point. The envoy’s mission has already made me an exile, now, it seems, it will make me a thief. There are no maps of the region we wish to traverse, but my best estimates put our trek at about eight hundred miles to Hudson Bay. No one has ever attempted such a thing before. If we’re unlucky, we’ll be the best reason for no one to attempt it after us.

It’s getting late. The envoy is asleep already, exhausted as he still is. I spent five minutes trying to see the difference that so unnerved me about him when I first saw him. The longer I look at him, the harder I find it to pick out. He just looks _human_ to me.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-3-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

The less said about our trek up the ice shelf, the better.

It was a miserable affair. Crozier and I had both estimated that there should be an easy path up, a place where the ice would bend to our will. Instead, we found inaccessible serpentines that turned into steep cliff faces without a warning; gorges that were too wide to jump. We almost lost our sledge and all our provisions to one of those in a futile attempt to cross it. I’ve never heard a Gethenian swear as the Ambassador did then, which delighted me. Hysteria was a symptom of the constant exhaustion I felt, from physical exertion beyond what my body was used to. The climate was wearing me out.

It was the next day that I noticed Ambassador Crozier was acting different towards me.

We had been hauling all morning, with nothing but a brief and unsatisfying breakfast. Our goal, as every day, was ten miles, though we’d fallen short more often than not. The Ambassador told me not to worry: We’d soon get the hang of it, and then we’d be making good on the ground we were failing to cover at first. I now know that he was likely lying to me to make me feel better. A strange thought now, it would have been even stranger then, when I was sure he did not think very highly of me.

When we stopped to drink and eat the quarter cube that was our lunch ration—I did not feel hungry while hauling, simply a profound nausea that comes from persistently overexerting myself—I noticed the Ambassador staring at me, deep lines creasing his forehead, his mouth pressed into a firm line. A scowl from him was nothing new—I had been subjected to plenty of those in Erhenrang. There had been, I sensed, a deep dissatisfaction on the ambassador’s part with the spectacle surrounding my arrival, though he had never said as much to my face. Since coming up on the ice, however, there had been little time or cause for such animosities, which was why it puzzled me so.

I chose not to say anything then. Perhaps, I reasoned, it was simply the brightness of the sun that had caused him to squint, or the exertion marring his brow. Better to be polite and nurse my injured pride in the privacy of my own mind. What Ambassador Crozier thought about my mission or myself was of little consequence to our immediate survival.

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Getheny Thanern_ _of the Year 1_

We have made some progress over the last days. This should console me more than it does: We’re finally moving in the right direction, and the going is relatively clear considering this is the rough part of the ice shelf. Here, ice presses against the constant flow of magma from the mountains, folding over and in on itself, creating ridges that dwarf a man. But the Envoy and I work tirelessly, and so we’ve managed to hit our goal these past three days.

I am aware of the toll this is taking on the Envoy.

He struggles with the exertion of hauling, though his physique is that of a runner and he told me that he has experience with cross-country treks. But he sleeps fitfully and eats as though it pains him. I know the signs. I’ll have to watch him. He told me once that pride is a sin of his.

Apart from that, a new problem has presented itself.

I entered _secher_ yesterday. I know this would happen and was not concerned until this morning. Without a partner near, the most I can expect to experience is some discomfort—a longing for closeness that will be nothing worse than what I have experienced over the last years. But something feels different.

I couldn’t be sure yet. It was possible the symptoms were psychosomatic—an expression of my worst fear. This morning, however, I felt the stirrings of _thorharmen_ come over me and soon enough my body began to change.

I will not tell him.

Considering how I viewed him, I can’t imagine he thinks very highly of me. I’ll spare us both the embarrassment of that conversation.

I know I should be consoled by our progress over the last days, but it is hard with all the miles still ahead of us. Makes me wish I’d never accepted the posting as ambassador, or at least that I’d had the good sense to keep my head down, and my ambitions in check.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-4-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93. _

We were forced to cut our trip short that afternoon.

It began to snow almost as soon as we set out. Ambassador Crozier watched the snow with a dark expression when we stopped to drink, but I thought it was beautiful: the sky, grey in its entirety, seemed an unbroken pane of steel that melted into the snowy horizon. The flakes that came down were plaintive little things, barely worth speaking of, and yet lending an air of mysticism to the view.

I was soon to change my mind. I now know the meaning of such a grey sky.

The snow grew thicker quite quickly. After a couple of hours, I had trouble even seeing the ambassador. Luckily, we were tethered to each other by the sledge, but the snow also made it impossible to see obstacles in our path until they appeared directly in front of us. Had we not wasted three days trying to get up the ice shelf, I’m sure the ambassador would have called a halt sooner, but even he felt pressured by the knowledge of our dwindling provisions, and it pushed him towards recklessness.

By mid-afternoon we both had to admit it was hopeless: we could barely see, and the snow had begun to seep through our cold-weather gear, leaving us wet, weighed down, and shivering. I was relieved when Crozier called a halt and, over the roaring of the wind, suggested we set up the tent.

I left my wet outer layers at the mouth of the tent, then stripped off my sweater as well when the stove got going. It would help both me and the sweater to dry faster. The ambassador was more reclusive, busying himself with his boots and then with dinner, saying little and frowning all the while. At the time I just assumed he was exhausted, and left him to it, for I feared anything I could say would lead to such a disagreement as we’d had frequently in our early acquaintance.

He directed me to go to sleep when it was time, claiming he wanted to note some observations he’d made in his journal. Exhausted as I was, I did not question it overmuch, and was asleep almost as soon as I’d zipped up the sleeping bag.

I awoke from a distinct lack of warmth, and with a distinct sense of disorientation. The stove was still going, its status lights blinking like twin stars in the darkness of the tent. The wind was howling around us, and the walls of the tent shook with it. It took me a moment to realise that the lack of warmth I felt was from the fact that Ambassador Crozier was not in the sack with me.

I sat up and looked around. Crozier was sitting across the tent, knees drawn up to his chest. His head was resting on his knees. He looked like he was asleep.

“Ambassador,” I said. He stirred.

“Might be a bit warmer in here,” I suggested. At that, he looked suddenly panicked—a cagey look of wild eyes that lasted only a second before he composed himself. I could _see_ him taking a deep breath.

“It’s alright. I don’t feel particularly tired.”

Now _that_ was a lie. “Ambassador,” I insisted, and watched the pained twist of Crozier’s mouth as I reached out towards him. “This is not the time to be foolish.”

“A man may insist on his dignity, even in the face of certain death, may he not?” Crozier’s face was begging me to understand, and I blame only sleep and the strangeness of the situation for not figuring it out sooner. “Let’s speak of it no more.”

“You have made demands of me far more invasive than a good night’s sleep,” I said, perhaps a little peevish because he was being so recalcitrant. “Now come to bed.”

Crozier sighed, a defeat he felt with his whole body. “Alright.”

He slipped into the bag with me, bringing a rush of cold air, his warm body and icy feet. I shivered as he arranged his arm around me as he’d done the last weeks—the warmth was a blessing, and most of the cold I had felt subsided over the next minutes. I fell asleep again rather quickly.

The next time I woke, Crozier was snoring quietly, belying his story about not being tired. I smiled to myself, quite satisfied, and shuffled deeper into his embrace—quite shamelessly, I will admit, but I was rather thin still from my weeks of imprisonment. I was cold almost all the time except for those nights in the sack. As I did, however, I felt myself brush against something firm that was decidedly _not_ a leg, poking rather insistently at my backside, and froze.

I cannot describe the rush of thoughts that went through my mind. Panic unspooled my thoughts as quickly as dropping a thread. I somewhat extricated myself from the embrace as best I could, fearing I would wake the ambassador. He had obviously dreaded revealing his condition—by the Worlds of the Ekumen, he was in _kemmer_!—to me, and the last thing I wanted was for him to have his fear of rejection confirmed.

I tried to go back to sleep, but the knowledge of what was behind me—the knowledge of the ambassador’s manhood, however fleeting—was impossible for me to ignore, and as the darkness of the snowstorm gave way to a grey morning, it became clearer and clearer precisely why that was the case.

It was just our luck that the storm did not abate. We were forced to spend the whole day in the tent, Crozier tending to his journal or doing inventory while I kept busy by listing all of the Ekumen’s capitals, then their heads of government, then governing parties, and starting all over again when that wouldn’t keep me busy anymore. I wanted desperately to ignore the curiosity that had been kindled within me, the twitching thing in my gut that wondered, probed— _no_. It was unprofessional.

It didn’t help that I was cold from the lack of movement. I had to retire to the sleeping bag, lying curled up by the stove for most of the day, alternating between shivering and feeling like I was coming down with a fever. It was like my body had entirely unlearnt to keep its own temperature without Crozier there to provide a fix point.

Now that I knew what I was looking for, I saw the other changes in his body, and I realised at the same time why he had kept the bulk of his clothes on even when the tent usually ran slightly too warm for him: they concealed his silhouette and therefore the changes to his physiology. He looked uncomfortable, though I wasn’t sure if that was from the demands the _kemmer_ made on his body, or the embarrassment of having to share it with me. I hoped it was the former. I feared it was the latter.

How very strange: I had come from unimaginably far away to bridge the distance between his people and mine, and yet in this tent, where he was no more than a metre away from me at all times, I found the gulf as wide as it had ever been.

That night, he crawled into the sleeping back without argument but kept as much distance between us as possible. I lay awake for a while, and I had no doubt that he did, too, but eventually the incessant wind lulled me to sleep. I woke a few hours later, when it was still dark outside. Something told me immediately that Crozier was awake as well. I held my breath.

I wondered what he was thinking in that moment—if he resented me for being here, or if his thoughts were not of me at all. Both were plausible. I longed for words that might reassure him, and reassure me in turn, that all was well between us.

Instead of words, a hand reached out in the darkness—Crozier, covering my hand with his own. “Go back to sleep.”

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Sordny Thanern_ _of the Year 1_

We are finally underway again.

The storm has abated—I’ve been expecting storms like this; it’s the season for them. But I still resented the setback. My time in _kemmer_ is also coming to an end, painful and humiliating as it was.

I’ve put this log away several times because I find myself incapable of writing about it. I have known the envoy for over a year now, during which I have been in _kemmer_ a number of times. And I’ve certainly never shown any physical reaction towards him.

Perhaps it’s the reaction of a body robbed of choice, but I wanted him, and that scared me. I know he doesn’t, _can’t_ want me in the same way I wanted him in that moment, and if he did, I can’t want him like that the rest of my time. It’s already abating, but I can still feel the echo of it: how aware I was of every part of him, how I saw his body in a different light.

He must know. There was precious little I could do to conceal my condition. Yet he was gracious and did not mention it. Maybe there’s some tact in the man after all—I certainly wouldn’t have thought it possible after watching him trample around Karhide for a year. Where were these diplomatic instincts when he was sharing his ridiculous stories at every dinner table I invited him to? He might have been a more palatable guest.

I have to put these thoughts aside. We still have most of the way to go when it comes to ground covered—the result of too many days with little to no progress made.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-5-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

It was hard to tell time on the ice. Instead of a calendar, we mostly marked the passing of time through days travelled and distance travelled, the two of them never matching up quite as satisfyingly as we might want them to. I spent hours of our evenings fruitlessly trying to eke out more travel time by going over the math for our supplies. Crozier seemed less concerned.

He did ask me to tell a story once or twice—the first time surprised me, seeing as he’d advised me on multiple occasions that my ‘boasting’, as he called it, was not welcome at dinner in Karhide. But I obliged him, though I felt terribly homesick after telling the one about Dundy and his cat. I hoped I would see him again, in three months’ time perhaps, when we’d reached Karhide and I’d contacted my ship.

Another night, Crozier asked me about mindspeak.

He’d been fascinated by it when I first mentioned it. The others had expressed their curiosity but quickly lost interest when I wouldn’t indulge them with a demonstration. They’d been looking for cheap magic tricks. Not so Crozier, who’ listened with blue eyes trained on me and asked no questions, though I could see them forming behind his forehead.

“You said it would take training.”

I looked up from my journal. I had been trying to note down some of the weeks that I had lost at the labour camp. It was a miserable endeavour, and I was glad to be distracted.

“What would take training?”

“Mindspeak.”

I put my journal aside. “Why do you ask?”

Crozier had his legs folded under himself. He looked like he wanted to affect casual interest, but he abandoned that now. As he leaned forward, I noticed for the first time the gap between his teeth when he smiled.

“You said it would take training, which takes time. We have nothing but time now.”

“You want to learn it?”

I was surprised. When I had told the people of Karhide about mindspeak, they had _oh_ -ed and _ah_ -ed at my descriptions, but recoiled at my explanation that it was a language in which one could not lie. I had suspected that Crozier, the most miserable and secretive of the bunch, would share this prejudice.

“I would like to try.” He met my eyes only briefly. “If you think it’s possible.”

“Of course.” I was still a little stunned. “Do you want to try it now?”

Crozier shrugged. “We might as well.”

“Alright.”

I felt my mouth was dry, and reached for some of the snowmelt. It was lukewarm on my tongue. I shifted into a new position—one of my legs had begun to fall asleep—then cleared my mind as I had been taught.

I bespoke him, with all the clarity of my mind.

_“Ambassador Crozier.”_

There was no response, but I hadn’t expected one: It was tricky, bespeaking someone who had not been spoken to before. But Crozier’s eyes were bright and willing.

I shifted again, still feeling vaguely uncomfortable. “It might be easier if you—ah—clear your mind. Try to think of nothing.”

Crozier nodded. I tried again.

_“Ambassador Crozier.”_

No reaction. I could see the disappointment on Crozier’s face, though he hid it well. Everything I learnt about him led me to the conclusion that I had misjudged him, worse than all the others I had met in Karhide.

We tried for a while, until my mind felt hoarse and we both decided it would be better to get our rest for tomorrow’s hauling. As he slipped into the bag with me, I laid a hand on his arm. “Don’t be discouraged. The first contact is always the hardest.”

He smiled briefly at that. “I image you speak from experience.”

I was not yet accustomed to having that smile turned on me, and I fumbled with my words as I withdrew my hand. “It’s—well, the challenge is never quite—" I sighed. “There’s only so much that even the most thorough anthropological training can prepare you for.”

We were both quiet as we settled into our sleeping positions. It didn’t feel foreign to me, in fact quite the opposite—in this deserted land we had somehow, with our routines, managed to carve out this most unlikely thing, a home.

We did not attempt mindspeaking again for a couple of days—as it turned out, the following days were some of the hardest of our journey yet. At first it was only some clouds, marring the clear weather, with the sun still shining brightly. Neither of us took much notice of it. The next day when we stepped out of the tent, we found ourselves in a different world.

On Terra, early philosophers had seen the place of their planet in the wider universe as fixed but surrounded by spheres, to which the planets and stars were stuck in unchanging positions. I had often wondered how one could come to such a conclusion, until I stepped out of the tent that morning, and found myself in the middle of a perfect globe of white light as far as I could see.

I turned around quickly, for I wasn’t quite sure the tent would still be there—but of course it was, and Crozier was just climbing out of the entrance, squinting at the bright light.

We set out, though I already felt a little dizzy. My inner ear rebelled at the lack of a fixed horizon; I felt like I was about to slip sideways into the endless sky. Crozier was affected too. He kept checking the compass, and by midday we had only made a couple of miles but were exhausted enough for a full day of hauling. The following two days went much the same, and we were so exhausted in the evenings that I barely had the energy to help Crozier with the setting up of camp, much less take off my clothes once we were in the tent. Crozier had to undress me like a child while I stared blankly at the canvas of the tent ahead of me.

When the weather finally cleared, I could have fallen to my knees and wept. The simple relief of a clean line of horizon was enough to have me swaying on my legs, my eyes stinging hotly—I might have cried, too, were it not for the knowledge of Crozier beside me. The thought of him still stopped me then. I hadn’t yet shed all shame.

That night, we were in high spirits. I hadn’t seen Crozier smile so much before. It transformed his face when he did it: he became softer around his miserable edges that had always seemed so masculine to me. Now I saw nothing in his face but him.

“Would you like to try again? The mindspeaking?”

Crozier nodded immediately, and we once more arranged ourselves facing each other. It was a strange, intimate dance in the small tent, both of us bumping into the other. I instructed Crozier to clear his mind, and then bespoke him.

The effort was no less frustrating the second time around, for Crozier more so than for me, I assumed. I, at least, knew from experience that it did work, even if it took time to get there. The expectant look on his round face never wavered and I felt a sharp twinge in my chest at the patience and kindness that I saw there. It was mortifying. I had to look away.

“You know, this might be easier—” I paused, shook my head.

“Yes?”

Crozier’s face was slightly pink with effort. It endeared him to me, and I felt the sharp longing again.

“Well, it might be easier if I knew your name,” I said. “Crozier is your… honorary name, correct?”

He laughed at my juggling of the terminology but acquiesced. “I see what you mean. Though I might ask for the same honour in return, Envoy Fitzjames.”

“James,” I said immediately. “My name is James.”

“James. James Fitzjames.” Crozier’s mouth was shaping itself around the syllables. “It rhymes.”

I must have made a face, for Crozier doubled down. “It does!”

I shook my head, thinking about how Crozier might be the first person I’d met who would take that name as just that—a name that was mine, and that signified nothing but me. Perhaps it wasn’t such a terrible burden, out here.

“Well,” Francis said, “It’s an honour to meet you, James. I’m Francis.”

It suited him, Francis. I repeated it in my mind, fixing him with my eyes— _Francis_ —and his eyes widened as my voice rang out in his head, clear as a ship’s bell.

“That was—” His mouth snapped shut. “ _I heard you_.”

In all the hours of trying, I had somehow not prepared myself for this—hearing Francis in my head, the closeness of two minds touching. I gasped; reached for his hand on instinct.

_“It’ll be easier from now on.”_

I wanted to tell him everything I’d ever learnt for the simple joy of closeness of his mind. It was a childish impulse, like fearing the night after one’s birthday because what if the presents wouldn’t be there anymore come morning?

Francis nodded, his eyes dark blue in the low light of the tent. We did not speak more that night. Francis claimed exhaustion, and I felt the same when I had calmed the frantic beating of my heart. Even so, bedding down in the sack, I still heard the echo of his voice in my head. It coloured the sounds of the tent, the howling of the wind—I felt like I had been seeped in him.

After that, things were easier and harder between us.

They were easier because I could finally believe what had taken me so long to see: the kindness at the heart of Francis Crozier that asked for no reward and recognition but simply did what needed doing. He cared, to a degree that some might consider painful, about the wellbeing of others. Somehow, in my time in Karhide—bumbling fool though that I was—he had included me in that circle.

Things were harder because hard on the heels of that realisation had come another one: that the differences between us were surmountable—so surmountable in fact, that I might find myself wanting him.

I had not anticipated this. No one had ever taught me about it—love, or the simple possibility that I might find someone who saw me while looking for something entirely different. It was terrifying. That night, I looked at Crozier and tried to see the tight-lipped ambassador who had welcomed me in the name of the king. I would have thought that exile should shrink a man—the loss of the soil one is so accustomed to must be a fatal blow even to the most hardened of men—but he had acquired a rugged sort of strength, not that of a politician but that of a man. Or, perhaps, exile had stripped him of all pretences, like peeling back the shell of an oyster, until his innermost core was revealed.

“You’re staring, James,” he said, and his use of my name still jolted me, the way it came with a smile like I had never seen on his face: one eyebrow raised, revealing a gap between his teeth that gave his smile a boyish quality. I found it excessively endearing.

“I assure you, there was no anthropological curiosity to it.”

“Oh?”

Only by the raising of his eyebrow to heretofore unknown heights did I realise how my words might be taken. I blushed and looked away. There was safety in the position of a detached observer. This—this was not safe.

I had forbidden myself these thoughts for a reason since that first miserable _kemmer_ spent trying to occupy my time with anything else to spare the ambassador and myself the mortification of it all. He had not reacted to me, he couldn’t have, for he had become undoubtedly male—but, the traitorous part of my mind supplied, homosexuality was not unheard of on Gethen. The long and short of it was that I had no reason to suspect interest from Francis and indeed there was a multitude of arguments against my own interest, my professional integrity included, yet I could not deny that I was attracted to him. He was handsome, in the right light. Beautiful in others.

“Francis,” I warned. The use of his name was a concession that belied the tone of my voice.

He withdrew immediately, and I could not help but feel disappointed. He was an excessively practical man, mindful of the need for boundaries if we were to survive in this small tent.

“Forgive me.”

There was something in his voice, the quality of someone accustomed to rejection. I had little defence against it, not with the mutual regard that had grown between us. I longed to reassure him in turn.

“I was thinking about Karhide.”

The ambassador’s mouth twitched unhappily.

“You must miss it,” I said.

“I’m not sure I can allow myself the luxury.”

He had withdrawn into himself—a man who kept his own counsel. I thought that, in his position, _shiftgretor_ made for very lonely people. I wanted to show him he was not alone.

“I expect I shall die on Gethen.”

His eyes narrowed at that, a sudden and precise focus that was his way of showing surprise. “Don’t you want to go back to your people?”

I don’t remember if I laughed. I wanted to, but I also recognised the bitterness in it—once upon a time I had been young, and eager to leave behind what I knew for this great adventure in a time where no one would remember who I had been. Even Dundy, if I managed to live long enough to wake him with the ship, would be at least two years out of synch, and it was not a given that I would ever see him again.

“My family is dead,” I said. “The time-jump, remember?”

Francis nodded slowly. “I had not considered—” he said, then paused to compose himself. “This mission must mean a great deal to you, if that’s a sacrifice you’re willing to make for it.”

“I’m told the Mobiles don’t consider it a sacrifice but an honour.”

I wonder how many of them had lived to regret their decision. There was rarely ever such a thing as perfect certainty.

“And you?”

Francis was too perceptive. I wanted to shirk his gaze, to wield a smile or turn a corner and not face the question. Ever since I entered into the service of the Ekumen, I had been convinced of its purpose and my place in it. It had held me together during those weeks in the camp. And now this strange man with his knowing blue eyes went and knocked at the fundaments of it and found them hollow.

“It’s not quite so terrible,” I said, “If you know that you have a friend with you.”

I looked him in the eye as I said it. He nodded, once.

“Then I shall say the same about Karhide and the Corner Red Dwelling, James.”

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Eps Thanern of the Year 1_

We spent the last week brooding over the map by night.

The ice shelf has never been mapped comprehensively, and much of the information I thought we had has already proven outdated or plain wrong. All we have are my navigational skills, though positional measurements are hard to take under most weather conditions. This week, at last, was one of extraordinarily clear skies, which allowed us to painstakingly triangulate our position.

The news is bad but not terrible.

We haven’t been making much headway. That part is much as we suspected. On the map we’re still closer to Orgoreyn than I’d like. But we have stayed on track through the bad weather, barring some minor adjustments, and with the weather conditions so clear, we actually are making good way. Every night, the indicator on the sledge show another fifteen miles covered.

Ever since the Envoy has bespoken me, I feel a different awareness of him. He has not touched my mind again, a courtesy, I feel, on his part. But I won’t forget the clarity of that moment, the way I saw all of him while his voice was in my head.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-6-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

We were making good progress for a while.

Crozier was beginning to smile at times, a tentative thing that served only to tighten my heart. Every night, I went to bed in a good mood despite my tired bones. In these days, it all seemed like a grand adventure to me, despite the privations we’d borne thus far.

I found myself thinking of the days during the snowstorm more often too.

That was an unfortunate side effect of my good mood—it kept my energy up, and with it came, unbidden, the memory of the hard line of Francis’s desire pressing against me. How undeniable it had been and still gone ignored, how damning and yet impossible it was. He could not want me, I knew, and yet he had clearly wanted. My body reacted to that.

I looked at him and found myself no longer idly irritated—instead I was beset by the longing to tase his skin, to set my teeth to the exposed shell of his ear when he pulled down his hood. And I wanted him to touch me in turn, to feel how I ached for him. I did ache, for the tent provided little privacy and I hadn’t been touched by another person with desire in all my time on Gethen.

So that was less than ideal. What made it worse was that the ambassador had become more and more tactile—just this morning, he’d slung his arm around my shoulders in celebration after we broke the sledge free of an outcropping of ice. But I could not let this continue in good faith, knowing what my heart and my body wanted. Every night he slipped into the sack with me and I felt shame at the solace I took from his embrace.

Still, I kept quiet. I told myself I did not want to lose his friendship.

My forbearance held until two days later. I had taken to putting off my bedtime, despite how tired I was—strange how our roles had been reversed; now it was I who dallied at night, not wanting to go lie down with him. At least Francis had had the solace that his _kemmer_ would fade. I was bound to this body and its desires.

As I busied myself folding my cold weather gear, Francis paused, halfway into the sack.

“Have I done something to offend you, James?”

I startled. “You—no, of course not, what—”

Francis silenced me with a look. He had that power. “You’ve been avoiding me, James. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. If it’s something I’ve done, I’d like you to tell me, so that I can fix it.”

This was, of course, torture of the highest order—his kind eyes, their whole attention turned on me, and the way it excited me. Nobody had ever looked at me like Francis did. Perhaps I did owe him honesty, after I had forced the same from him.

“You see, Francis—” I paused, struggling with the admission, feeling heat on my cheeks like I hadn’t thought possible up on the ice. “I want you. Quite a lot, in fact. I know it’s not fair to you, but I can’t help it, either.”

Francis had frozen were he sat. I felt bad for subjecting him to it, but I knew by now that words not spoken festered, and I had been suffering quietly for so long.

“James…”

His use of my name still stunned me. When he said it, my name sounded like a private thing.

“You don’t mean that.” He corrected himself. “You can’t mean that.”

There it was again, the thing we staked our identities on: difference. The border, a clear marker, not a line in the snow but a wall. Ink on a map. No wonder it had taken Gethenians so long to come up with the concept of one, in a world where the Other was not another person but oneself.

I was beyond sick of borders.

“You understand why I was selected for this mission, right?”

How could he? Strange, how this process never ended: of explaining myself, and the difference that others couldn’t see. The undeniable differences in our physiology were one thing—it was another to explain the way we moulded our identities on it, or in opposition to it. Gethen had never developed a concept of gender as a social identity, for why should they—it would have been a malleable category, nothing that engendered solidarity. And yet it mattered, in encountering us. I owed him the full picture.

“I’m not a man.”

I was faced with the near insurmountable task of having to invent an entire vocabulary to explain to Francis what precisely I meant.

“Imagine if you felt attached to the body that you had in _kemmer_. Imagine that was part of who you were, always.” No, that wouldn’t do, not at all. “Just as your biology does not determine your identity, my biology does not determine my identity.”

Francis frowned. Oh but bless him—he had no reference category for what I was describing but he was trying, I could see it on his face, with the same earnestness that he had put towards understand mindspeak when I tried to explain it to him.

I had no other words to explain it.

“I’m not a man.”

“Then who are you?”

“James,” I said, “Just James.”

That was the long and short of it: How I sat beside the category I had assumed as a child, feeling like a balloon tethered to earth by a flimsy string. Coming here at freed me.

I was suddenly very tired. I had never expected—I had known how I would come to be seen, and what I would stand for. My own relationship to my gender, tenuous as it was, had become wholly untethered here.

Francis nodded. There was an earnestness to him that I was drawn to: it lent a gravity to his body.

“I think that’s quite a handful already.”

One of the first investigators on Gethen wrote of this world that here, one is respected and judged as a human being. She wrote that it was an appalling experience. I was beginning to understand her better and better. Francis’s regard was nothing like the flirtations I had in the past—on the contrary, I knew in that moment that his regard for me was born out of nothing but what he saw in me as a person, and that was both flattering and terrifying.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that we may have more in common than you think.”

Francis licked his lips, an unconscious gesture. I wanted to kiss him. I did not.

“I don’t—”

He made a gesture that somehow attempted to encompass everything about him—his body and its relationship to desire, our differences and our similarities.

“I know,” I said, “But you did. You wanted me, back then.”

“James, I don’t want to be unfair to you.” He was actively distressed now. “That was—I didn’t think it was possible. It might remain a singular occurrence. An aberration.”

It didn’t feel like rejection.

“Love, then,” I said.

“I might—” Francis’s eyes found mine, helpless and as adrift as I felt.

I had not been brave enough to kiss him, but he was brave enough to kiss me.

The shock of a touch after so long without it was something I would remember to the end of my days. Francis kissed me timidly, like he wanted to give me space to retreat should I want to. I did not want to. I wanted to climb into his skin and wrap myself in him. I wanted to spirit us away to a warm and safe place where we might get to know each other in peace.

His arms came up to cradle me lightly. He broke the kiss, looking—flushed, stunned, happy, I could scarcely believe it.

“James,” he whispered, and I shivered. He kissed me again.

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Arhad Thanern of the Year 1_

I wake feeling like I have fallen into some kind of dream. James is still asleep, breathing slowly—still unused to the demands made on his body by our desperate escape, even after all these weeks. What I can see of him is a close-up of brown hair, shot through with grey now more so than it was when I first met him. What I can feel of him is the steady rhythm of his breathing, the warmth of his body, the scratchy fabric of his sweater, the weight of his body in my arms. What I feel for him—what he so brashly declared love yesterday, with the urgency of a man who’s never had to separate his sexual drive from his other feelings towards someone—is as-of-yet beyond my description, but I know it nevertheless. I know it will not fade—not with time, and not with distance. Not if the whole bloody kingdom of Karhide comes between us. I feel the urge to protect him and wonder if he would laugh at me for that.

I hope what I’m committing into writing now will not make me the mockery of future generations. But I have never met anyone who understood so clearly the things I hope to stand for and achieve, who believed with the same foolish fervency that it’s possible to achieve them if one is willing to sacrifice for them.

When James wakes, he smiles at me. He looks deliriously happy, baring that crooked tooth of his, pulling his face into an assemblage of lines that speak of his joy. He leans forward, but waits for me to meet him halfway for a kiss. I oblige him. I indulge myself.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-7-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

The ice was getting more unmanageable every day now.

I felt myself getting discouraged by our slow progress, at least until Francis explained that this likely meant we were approaching the end of the ice shelf, and would be able to begin our descent before long. Considering the state of our provisions, this was a relief to hear.

I rapidly felt myself approaching the end of my reserves. I had not been fit to begin with—worn-down as I had been by my time in the labour camp—but our exertions were beginning to push me to my limits. The prospect of fresh food and a good night’s rest in a real bed was a direly needed motivation, even as I felt it might mean losing the intimacy I shared with Francis.

It was silly, looking back, to mourn something I hadn’t even lost while every day seemed to bring me closer to a death by exhaustion I should be trying to avoid. Still, as the days went on, I felt myself dreading the inevitable black line on the horizon that would announce land. Every time the air shimmered in the distance my heart tightened and I held my breath, then cursed myself when it turned out to be nothing but a trick of the light.

It was even sillier considering that in all my worries, the ambassador’s exile somehow did not even cross my mind. Karhide meant safety, not a death sentence. The death sentence was waiting in Orgoreyn, and behind us on the ice.

We left the ice shelf on Posthe Anner, the eightieth day of our journey. The way down was slow and dangerous—hunger had made me light-headed and a little foolish—and light fell fast. At the first touch of solid ground under my feet, I felt a strange relief, as though something much more monumental than the end of our ordeal had passed. I looked at the snow-covered ground, stunned, trying to comprehend that we were here, that we had made it—

Francis touched my shoulder. I turned to him and his moonlit face. “Come, James,” he said, “Let’s find shelter.”

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Odsordny Anner of the Year 1_

The moment we burst through the doors of the hot-shop, like ice-ghosts from a Karhidish story told by the hearth, I feel the urge to take James’s hand and grasp it tightly. If I ever doubted my feelings, they become painfully clear to me in that moment—this is no mere fancy, nor the allure of the foreign but the longing for the familiar. Very few people are as familiar to me as James is now.

The people in the hot-shop certainly look like aliens to me—androgynous faces, round and startled at the two figures that have stumbled into their evening. No one comes here, certainly not in winter, and definitely not from the North. I remember that James will not, cannot take the lead, and so I step forward and claim guest-right for me and my companion. James must seem to them like a person in the early stage of _kemmer_ , which is good. Better they make a few false assumptions than lead us to expose who we are too early. I feel bad enough putting these people into danger without their knowing.

We are brought to the fire and fed. I have to prompt James to eat—I don’t think he realises how gaunt he’s grown. He falls into contemplation of the flames until I nudge him, and then eats another spoonful of the broth. We both cannot stomach much.

We’re given rooms. The hot-shop cook discreetly asks me if we would prefer separate rooms, and in that moment I choose the selfish impulse and tell him that one room will be sufficient. It doesn’t even occur to James to ask; he just falls into the bed and curls into me when I join him as though it’s simply a matter of course. I hold him. He’s asleep within minutes while I lie awake and try to imagine a future where I get to keep it all: my life, and James.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-8-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

I did tell the Stabiles I was sorry for breaking mission protocol eventually, but I felt it was warranted to save a friend’s life.

We had to barter for use of the transmitter. We’d already given our tent to the people who’d so kindly housed us these past few days while I regained my strength. We gave the stove to the man who operated the transmitter, and I prayed that we would not regret it in the coming days. Our safety was not yet guaranteed but we had nothing left, except to rely on the kindness of strangers.

In that moment I wished for nothing more than to be able to talk to Dundy. I didn’t want to put my hope into the message like wishing on a star—I wanted confirmation of our salvation, but all I could do was relay the message to Dundy and wait. Francis was still an exile putting the lives of good people—most of all his own—in danger. We could not rely on others’ hospitality indefinitely.

On the way back from the transmitter, I told Francis about what worried me; about how I felt I’d failed at the one thing the Ekumen asked of me: to not force change into the world, but to be changed by it, and in changing myself change them in turn.

“I did not want to make a calculation that forced me to choose between a man’s life and a principle.”

Francis smiled, in that enigmatic way of his—I used to think it mockery, now it seemed infinitely gentler to me. “Perhaps that means you’ve already changed.”

By the time we got back I was exhausted, worn out by the trip in a way I shouldn’t have been. If we wanted to make it back to Erhenrang, we would have to wait for the trade caravans come thaw or my recovery. I felt useless in my convalescence, a sentiment that Francis found amusing. At least it stopped my body from embarrassing me in the tight confines of our shared bed, but even then I wanted him—in all the ways he’d have me, I thought, and I’d count myself lucky, too.

Perhaps Francis was right. Perhaps I had changed.

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Getheny Irrem of the Year 1_

It’s the hot-shop cook who warns me, in the middle of the night, though he puts his own life in danger by doing so. He knocks discreetly at the door to our room, so quietly that James—still in recovery—does not even stir. I tip-toe to the door across the cold floor and ease it open, and there is the pale face of the one bringing me the bad news. He lays it out plainly, no pity or apology in his voice: the king has heard word that I am sheltering in Sassinoth. He has people out looking for me. It would be best for me to get going.

Sometimes I am still stunned by the loyalty I inspire in people, perhaps because this skill has always failed me when trying to play politics. But I know people well enough.

Most of the people have sussed out who we are by now, but they’re kind enough not to mention it. There’s a foolish bravery in that which I might commend, if it did not shame me every day. I should go to face my fate, and release these people from the danger of my presence. But I cannot leave James.

It’s a relief, then, to know the decision has been made for me. I pack my things. James stirs as I roll up the sleeping bag, the last thing remaining of our trek across the ice. He rubs at his eyes, still sleepy, but he wakes at once when he recognises I am wearing my outer gear.

“Francis? Where are you going?”

I wish I had never known that voice, so that I might be spared the pain of leaving him, no—I selfishly wish I could take him with me where I went, so that his presence might give me courage until the very last moment. I close my eyes against the tears I feel: best to not let him see me cry. He has a protective streek in him.

“My presence has been announced to the king. I’ll leave for Orgoreyn.”

James is out of the bed before I have finished my sentence. He sweeps his hair out of his face—he still looks painfully thin, I think, and I wish for more time simply so that I can see his recovery through to the end. “I’m coming with you.”

“To Orgoreyn? Out of the question.”

James can’t have forgotten the camp, or else he’s not weighing the danger properly. I hope he’ll be less brash when I am gone. But James relents—here is a man who has learnt his lesson. “To the border, then.”

We stare at each other, neither of us willing to yield. Finally, I can no longer bear the solidity of his gaze.

“Alright. To the border.”

His grin, I think, should not look so pleased.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-8-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

It was still dark when we set out, and I was feeling deeply nauseous, though I could not say if it was from lack of food or the trepidation that sat in my gut. I put on my layers and strapped on my boots without much feeling. The cold air when we stepped outside the hot-shop was a shock. The snow came down thickly, in flakes that looked cut out by the hand of a God who had grown tired of their work. The road was lined by pines that were little more than tall and ominous shapes in the dark. The wind bit my cheeks and nipped at my hands.

When I lost Francis the first time—before I even knew what he would come to mean to me—it had hit me hard. This time, I feared, it might be unbearable.

Francis skied ahead, and I followed closely behind him, wishing I could hold his hand. There was a finality about this march that I felt even then. As the sun slowly rose above the horizon, I could make out the set to Francis’s shoulders, the way he kept his head down and moved steadily onwards. He hadn’t looked like that on the ice, which told me all I needed to know.

We reached the border shortly before midday. We approached it through the pine forest that is so common here, and with good reason—Francis spied the guards before I did and called a halt.

“They’re Karhidish,” he said, “Which means they must be looking for me.”

“You can’t cross here!”

 _Wait for Henry_ , I wanted to tell him, _just hide a few weeks longer. Stay with me_.

“I’ll wait till nightfall.” Francis mustered the border with narrowed eyes and a practical set to his face. He seemed sure of what he was doing—ridiculous, he was a politician, and yet he acted as though he’d been an outcast all his life. His confidence had kept us alive on the ice, but now I felt it fell to me to remind him that he was not invincible.

“What will they do to you, if they capture you?”

Francis shrugged, an infuriating gesture. “ _Nusuth_. What does it matter?”

I threw my hands in the air but refrained from yelling out my frustration. “It matters to me, Francis Crozier!” I hissed.

Francis got very quiet at that, and avoided meeting my eyes.

We slipped into the sack together like we had done on countless nights in that endless expanse of white, where the whole world had consisted only of us. I longed for that simplicity, and I cried for it, my head buried against Francis’s shoulder. I think he cried as well. It seemed cruel, that fate should make him twice an exile, and bar me from him for the foreseeable future.

“I wasted so much time,” I said, “So much time thinking you despised me.”

“I wasted a lot of time despising you,” Francis said gently, “And then I didn’t dare hope you wouldn’t hold that against me.”

“Don’t go,” I said. He just smiled. “I am glad I got to meet you, Envoy James Fitzjames.”

Night came too quickly, and then I had to let him go: I sat crouched in the snow as he strapped on his skis and drew his hood in his face. Before he pushed off, he cast one last look over his shoulder—his face was so familiar to me, so well-loved that it felt like hearth and home to me. I raised a hand, and he returned the greeting. Then he was off.

He was a dark shape on a dark night, but not dark enough. The first volley of gunfire had me on my feet quick as lightning. I screamed.

I set off in a blind panic, not even caring that I was running towards the guns that had cut Francis down before my very eyes. I was still screaming, but like in some nightmare, nobody was paying me any mind. Francis was staggering to his feet again and my heart lurched painfully even as I scrambled forward and the guards raised their guns again—

“Stop shooting! By the Fastness, _stop shooting!_ ”

There was another figure coming out of the distance, on skis, a hood drawn into his face. The guards lowered their guns. The snow around Francis was very, very red.


	3. Chapter 3

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Opposthe Irrem of the Year 1_

There's a familiar figure next to my bed when I wake.

“Ross.”

My voice is rough from disuse, which tells me something about how long I’ve been out. Virtually every part of my body hurts, but in that strange distant way of illness—so long as I don’t focus on it, it’s bearable, but when I try to look at Ross more closely or move my legs it shoots up painfully and I hiss. Ross smiles at that, and shakes his head.

“Leave it to you to try getting up immediately after coming out of a coma.”

“James—” I say, and Ross puts a hand on my arm. “It’s alright.”

I shake my head, forcefully. “The Envoy. Is he alright?”

Ross blinks once, stunned. “Yes. I believe he’s at the palace today, preparing the landing of his ship.”

I sink back into the pillows, feeling lightheaded. This is more than I dared hope for, which is perhaps why a small sliver of doubt remains in me.

“What—how—” I fix Ross with a glare as though hoping to pin him down with the force of my will. “Why am I still alive?”

Ross is silent for a moment, searching my face for something. “Did you tell him you were trying to get yourself killed in some noble quest to save his life?”

He knows me too well, that’s the problem. How many times last spring in Erhenrang had I thought of all the things Ross and I could have achieved had he not retired to the Fastness? I was so sure, then, that all I needed was Ross and our ability to play the _shifgrethor_ in the inner circles of the palace in order to achieve both peace on the border and an audience for the envoy’s mission. Maybe it was out of spite that I tried to achieve both anyway.

“I wasn’t—”

Ross tilts his head downwards and fixes me with a pointed stare. “ _And_ die on the very same border you want to see open again?”

“Why did you leave the Fastness?”

To avoid answer his question, I hope to distract him. Ross smiles like he knows, but indulges me. “There was talk that you’d returned to Karhide.”

“Would that you had remained happily ignorant of that fact.”

“In this case, no, Francis, ignorance is not a blessing. I came back to Erhenrang and what I found there shocked me. Intrigue! Slander of your good name! And all this talk of an envoy from another planet who had supposedly aided you in your betrayal of the king.”

I grimaced hearing how our story had been twisted.

“Some people have a nose for change,” Ross said, “I know you do. I think I did, too, once upon a time. But whereas you and I have always worked tirelessly for the betterment of Karhide, others see this kind of change as an opportunity to advance their own goals.”

I try to sit up, but Ross pushes me firmly back into the bed. We never had _shifgrethor_ to waive with each other, something I am glad for now that I find myself so helpless.

“You should have watched better who else had the ear of the king.”

I flinch at the blunt words, blunter for the fact that I know he’s right and yet he shouldn’t put it like this. Hard truths are often easier to hear when they’re not phrased as such direct admonishments.

“The man was—well, _nusuth_ , but suffice to say he saw the opportunity for advancement and took it.”

I sink back into the pillows. I, who always prided myself on knowing the turning of the wheel, outplayed by someone I didn’t even see as important. “Did I know him?”

“ _Nusuth_ ,” Ross says again, “It’s done, Francis. Concern yourself with it no more.”

“But the king gave the order to kill me!”

“A month ago, when the rumour first took up that you were back. And he would have succeeded, too, if for no other reason that communications are slow in winter.”

Ross nods as it all dawns on me—the familiar voice as I lay bleeding out in the snow, ordering the border guards back, calming the envoy, calling for help. I look back at him and now I understand the look in his eyes: the fear of losing his friend. I reach for his hand on my arm and squeeze it.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Was he worth it? Is he worth it?” Ross looks at me seriously for a second, and I quash the urge I feel to defend James with my teeth bared.

“What’s he been telling everyone?”

Ross laughs, a strangely mirthful thing. “He’s been speaking of nothing but your bravery to anyone who will hear it, even to those desperate for a word of the starship coming soon.”

James. I pass a hand over my face and Ross, who must have seen the colour, laughs. “Oh Frank,” he says, “Why can’t you ever set your heart on a possible thing?”

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain. Transcript of document  
01-01101-934-9-Gethen. To the Stabile on Ollul:  
Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on  
Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

I won’t go into detail about the weeks that followed. Suffice to say that I slept poorly, ate less, and when Dundy landed on a sunny day in early spring, looking fresh as the day we had gone into stasis together, I wept in his arms. It was quite unbecoming, in front of all the assembled dignitaries, but I didn’t care.

The ambassador was still too tired to attend the ceremony, I was told. I spent one afternoon being horribly disappointed while Karhide’s dignitaries quizzed me on protocol and Karhide’s scientists suggested landing sites. I longed to see him, but first I was prevented, and then I found myself unsure if I was wanted, and so time passed.

Dundy was terribly worried for me. I knew I looked a fright, even after two months of good food and the relative warmth that my quarters provided. I told him some of what happened on the ice—more than I relayed to the Stabiles, less than I might have, two years ago. Watching him, I wondered what hopeful, innocent part of myself I had lost that had been able to conduct the business of the Ekumen so effortlessly. It was good I had called him down. I could not have gone on alone.

And then there was the night of the reception when everything slipped back into place.

For all the politicking I had done, I had never attended a party in Erhenrang—perhaps a dinner with more than two guests, but that was the most of it. I’d certainly never seen anything like the display of ambassadors and politicians from Karhide, Orgoreyn, from Sith and the Archipelago. The only time I’d seen something comparable had been during my time in Mishnory, and never as a diplomatic function.

I spied him by the fire, a full glass of steaming beer in his hand. There was a circle of empty space around him—he was untouched and untouchable at the same time, traitor and triumpher in one person. As befit him, he stood alone.

I went over to him.

“Ambassador,” I said when I stood before him. He looked well in his ceremonial garb, not at all like he’d spent three months starving himself to save a great fool from the workings of his own actions. My heart still leapt at the sight of him, more so now that I wasn’t concerned with my immediate survival.

“You look well,” he said, polite formality. Did it pain him? The distance between us certainly hurt me—it felt wrong, after so much time spent with barely a breath between us, like I was shouting at him from the wrong end of a chasm. “Are your rooms adequate?”

“I find them cold, as always,” I said. It was true enough—I was always cold—but I hoped that he understood me. I had not felt cold in our time on the ice shelf.

He looked at me for a long while—immobile, assessing with that piercing gaze of his. I found myself holding my breath, caught between my desire to reach out and the awareness of the eyes around us, the eyes on us. The ambassador smiled. I breathed out.

“I’ll see about providing some more heating.”

* * *

_Journal of Ambassador Francis Crozier,  
_ _Poste Moth of the Year 1_

I know where he’s staying; I’ve made sure to acquire that knowledge as soon as I was well enough to demand the information from Ross. If I hadn’t known, I would have pried the knowledge from one of the servants, on nothing but the chance that his remark at the reception today was more than polite formality. I have a need for him that is not physical, nothing like the passions of _kemmer_ , but that nevertheless sings in my blood day and night.

I knock. The silence after the knock leaves me enough time to contemplate the many false assumptions I might have made in coming here—and then the door opens and reveals James, wrapped in a blanket and smiling when he sees me.

“Francis,” he says, and I feel known by the way he says my name. “Come in.”

There are blankets piled on top of the sofa by the fireplace. I point at them. “What’s this?”

James shrugs. “The bed is rather far from the fireplace. I found it warmer to sleep on the sofa, closer to the fire.”

I regard him with a look that must carry something of the fearsome obstinance with which I dragged him across the ice, for James laughs with immeasurable fondness. He opens his arms and I come to him—he always waits for me, as though unsure of what intimacies will be welcome. As though I do not want him wholly and always, in a way that neither I nor my biology can comprehend. His skin really is cold, and I hurry him to the bed. I pile blankets upon blankets on top of him, then slip into bed next to him. He curls around me immediately, not content to be separated one iota from me.

This, this is what I have missed. His closeness, and the relief that comes with it. I fear I’ll never understand it, but I know it well now, this feeling.

“Is it better, like this?” I ask.

I know he’s smiling even though I can’t see his face, buried against my chest as it is. He’s an insufferable man. “Tolerable, I’d say.”

I snort, and he looks up at me suddenly, though how he manages to move at all under the weight of the blankets is beyond me. I feel smothered under the heat of them, but his skin is still cold to the touch. He smiles, and while I can see the joy in it, I also note the fragility. “I missed you, Francis.”

The admission humbles and scares me. Who am I, and what can I offer him that he should miss me?

“I can see that mind of yours working,” he says, and his smile is still a questing thing, unsure of its welcome.

“Only doubting the wisdom of missing me, when my position here is tenuous at best.”

“Must a heart always listen to reason?”

He has all these ideas—love, and romance, and the grand narrative of his mission that has propelled him from a world beyond my imagination into my arms. And I am a poor fool who barely knows what to do with such providence. I’ve made a life being practical about my dreams.

James nods, rather serious now. “You still doubt me. Very well.”

He puts a conspiratorial finger to his lips and winks at me, and then I hear him in my mind again, clear as day. “ _I missed you, Francis_.”

“No lies,” he whispers, leaning in, and then I kiss him with a fierceness I hadn’t thought myself to possess. How different it is, to kiss him in a soft bed! I feel like I’m floating, surrounded by a more pleasant kind of nothing than the ice had been. He places a hand on the side of my face as he presses in closer, and he is ever-so-gentle as he holds me. I want to show him the same amount of care.

We kiss for long moments under the warmth of the blankets, our legs entangled and our hearts beating in synch. In these moments, all thought of the future bleeds away, and my heart feels oddly small and fresh, like an untouched patch of snow. I can almost believe that things will turn out alright.

I can feel James growing hard against me as he shifts closer to me. He seems content to ignore it, as though my mere presence soothes him. My body does not answer in kind, but my heart does, and I feel myself seized by a desire to please him, even if I may not partake in the same ecstasies.

“James.”

He makes an endearing sound as I pull away. The smile on his face when I look at him is broad and self-conscious, and he ducks his head when he catches my eye.

“If the Stabiles could see me now—”

“Yes?”

He shakes his head. “Don’t know, actually. Perhaps they’d file it under _good relations_.”

He kisses me as though to test the theory and I have to disentangle myself with two hands on the side of his face. “James. Tell me how—”

I can feel the hot flush of embarrassment covering my face. “I want to please you.”

“Oh.” I watch as his eyes go wide. “I—You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” I say before he can protest more.

I watch him lick his lips, uncertainty suddenly colouring his expression. For a moment I fear that I’ve gone too far, that it’s not what he wanted after all, but then he looks at me with dark eyes, a helpless desire. “Yes,” he says and swallows, “Yes please.”

It’s strange. It’s foreign, and exhilarating. His body is new to me like the body of every new lover, and I learn it as such. There’s no experience that compares. He rests heavily on my tongue, and the tension that thrums through his body as I kiss him like this reveals a new angle of his beauty to me. He clutches at my hair, and I feel satisfied, cradled between his hand and his body. Afterwards, I trace the lines of his face, stroke his hair, and kiss his lips again.

There is a lot in this future that I can’t yet foresee. Karhide will change, just as I have already changed. James will change, more than he has already. We will learn to see ourselves with new eyes, and in meeting ourselves through the eyes of strangers, perhaps discover something true about ourselves.

I, for my part, will take James to Estre. I have been too long away from home, and James has no home now besides the one he chooses to make. Perhaps I can help him with that. When I watch him watch me, hope flares in my chest, bright as a sundog.

* * *

_From the Archives of Hain._   
_Supplemental to transcript of document_   
_01-01101-934-9-Gethen._   
_Report of James Fitzjames, First Mobile on_   
_Gethen/Winter, Hainish Cycle 93._

It’s a great gift, to be loved. In my youth I might have scoffed at the sentiment—I thought adventure harboured the only thing I desired, for my name to be known among those who’d made the greatest sacrifice to the Ekumen. In my life, I have been loved for many things—some of which I did, some of which I didn’t. I’ve been loved as myself and as an idea that someone had of me.

I’ve never been loved the way Francis loves me.

**Author's Note:**

> The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a world where the inhabitants are ambisexual and do not have a fixed sex. They exhibit sexual attributes only during _kemmer_ , when they have the potential to be sexually active. Gender is absent as an ordering principle in society. Karhide is ordered by _shifgrethor_ , a system of courtesy and rank. 
> 
> I am also on [tumblr](https://veganthranduil.tumblr.com) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/veganthranduil). If you enjoyed this, I would appreciate a little comment.


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